I Just got an Olympus E-420 for Christmas. It takes good pictures the way it came but it has so many settings and the book is hard to understand for a beginner like myself. Can anyone give me any helpful suggestions on how to take to best pictures. I like to take a lot of wildlife pictures, it came with a 14-42mm lens, what is the best lens to use for wildlife far off. Will other lenses work with this camera like Nikon or Cannon? Any help will be appreciated.

For wildlife the most cost effective lens if the Olympus 70-300mm which has an equivalent maximum reach of a 600mm lens on a full frame camera. That's long by any standards! For a budget lens it gives superb results. With slightly less range but absolutely top notch quality the 50-200mm is hard to beat, but it is much more expensive. Another expensive alternative is the Sigma 50-500mm, offering a massive magnification and good, if not top notch, quality.
Manual focus lenses of virtually any make can be used with a suitable adaptor (lots available on ebay) and are a very cost effective option but they may be difficult to focus and the quality will probably not match that of the 70-300mm. The main consideration when using lenses of this magnification is to keep the shutter speed high enough. Hand held at 300mm you need at least 1/1000th of a second to keep things really sharp. Are there any other specific questions you'd like to ask about the camera? Let us know how you get on.

__________________John

"A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there — even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity." ~ Robert Doisneau